Day 1 Schedule – December 12

All Times Central

8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.

IBM i Talks to Watson

Speakers: Scott Forstie, Doug Mack and Tim Rowe, IBM

Did you know that Watson and IBM i can work together? This session will review what Watson is and its importance in your business. We will then dive into the technology that allows you to connect your IBM i data to Watson. There are several different options, and we discuss each as we review this connection.

9:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.

Navigating the Cloud

Cloud adoption is accelerating at a rapid pace among businesses of all sizes, and the vast majority of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy. But what is driving this adoption? How do you know if cloud computing is right for your business and how do you select the right clouds and vendors?

This presentation is designed to help you navigate the journey in the cloud. It addresses key cloud trends which are shaping the industry, challenges and concerns surrounding the cloud and how to address them. It also provides a road map for managing a cost-efficient, multi-cloud environment while ensuring a high level of performance and security.

10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.

Security Primer: Compliance Made Simple for IBM Power Systems

When it comes to managing the security and compliance of your IBM Power Systems environment, there’s no need to complicate things. A simple and safe framework that prevents problems and allows you to sleep at night is the key to confidence.

An IBM security veteran and Vision Solutions will present:

Exclusive industry research that addresses your compliance and auditing concerns

Updates on industry standards and how compliance frameworks can address PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, NY State and EU requirements

Information about vital layers of security that protect your systems and support your compliance management and reporting needs

11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Security Bulletin: Malware Infection Discovered on IBM i Server!

Protecting servers and data from infection by viruses and malicious software is not an unfamiliar concept to IT personnel, but acknowledging how code-based threats can affect Power Systems servers is far less understood. This can have disastrous consequences.

Myths about viruses and IBM i—including the belief that the system is entirely immune—have been debunked; however, most Power Systems owners still don’t perceive viruses as a risk because they consider them to only be a Windows threat.

It’s critical to gasp the true impact upon IBM i and the network that connects to it. Attend this webinar to gain a thorough understanding of the relationships between:

Viruses, native objects, and the integrated file system (IFS)

Power Systems and Windows-based viruses and malware

PC-based anti-virus scanning versus native IBM i scanning

There are a number of ways you can minimize your exposure to viruses. Noted IBM i security expert Robin Tatam explain the facts, including how to ensure you’re fully protected and compliant with regulations such as PCI.

12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.

IBM i Security from the Ground Up

Speaker: Carol Woodbury, HelpSystems

Attend this session to learn the basics of IBM i Security. Carol will cover the three building blocks of IBM i Security – Security-relevant System Values, User Profile Configuration and Object Security. She will also describe how (the order) the system checks security as well as program adoption.

1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.

High Availability Options That Work for SMBs

High availability (HA) has long been considered a solution best suited for larger enterprises, but can today’s small and mid-sized business running on IBM i take advantage of this technology? Can it be affordable and easy enough to implement for SMBs?

The 2017 IBM i Marketplace Survey results show that 51% of IBM i shops have no high availability solution in place to help with disaster recovery, even though it’s a top priority. If you’re one of these shops—or if your current solution no longer meets business needs—it’s time to take another look at HA! There are more options in the high availability space for IBM i than ever before.

In this session, Tom Huntington discusses the pros and cons of these options, including:

Software and hardware replication solutions

Colocation

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS)

Capacity Backup (CBU) solutions

He’ll also discuss implementation considerations, role swaps, HA/DR testing, backups and managed service provider (MSP) options. As a bonus, you’ll learn other uses for software replication and see a demonstration of the Robot HA solution for software-based replication on IBM i.

2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.

HA/DR Trends and Technology

With 80% of IT pros planning HA/DR initiatives for the coming year, you need to be aware of changes in the technology landscape and new challenges on the horizon. Join Vision Solutions experts for an info-packed webcast as we share findings and conclusions from our latest survey from Vision Solutions Insights. Learn trends, explore the impact of cloud, find out HA/DR tech options and figure out new ways to obtain a higher level of availability.

We will cover:

Key HA/DR findings from our surveys

Different HA/DR options for IBM i

The latest objectives for uptime and data preservation

Achieving near-zero downtime with active-active replication

Improving DR plan confidence

3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

New IBM i Technologies That Make Backup/Recovery Better

Speaker: Debbie Saugen, HelpSystems

New software and hardware technologies are paving the way to make backup and recovery easier for IBM i customers.

Formerly the Technical Owner of IBM i Backup/Recovery and the IBM i National Lead for IBM Resiliency Services for IBM, Debbie Saugen knows how you can take advantage of the latest enhancements to make your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) targets more aggressive.

Don’t miss this educational session with Debbie. You’ll hear her real-life disaster recovery experiences and learn a little more about how this DR expert views the pros and cons of the backup/recovery technologies like:

Tape and virtual tape library (VTL) backups

Cloud backups

Logical and physical replication

Add in some good planning for recovery and you will be able to select the best technology that meets your needs within your budget.

4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

What You Need to Know to Successfully Upgrade to 7.3, 7.2, and 7.1

Speaker: Pete Massiello, iTech Solutions Group

When upgrading IBM i, there is more work involved in the planning of the upgrade than in the actual upgrade itself. By having done the planning, the actual upgrade is simple. We will cover planning tips, prerequisites and then post installation requirements. Your upgrade isn’t complete until this last step is done. While this presentation will focus on upgrading to 7.3, if you are upgrading to an earlier release (7.2, 7.1), we will also cover those releases.

Day 2 Schedule – December 13

All Times Central

9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.

Let’s Join Together – Joining SQL Tables and Views

Speaker: Birgitta Hauser, Toolmaker Advanced Efficiency GmbH

Accessing data with SQL becomes more and more important as resolving a single request data located in multiple tables must be filtered, accumulated and/or merged together. Therefore, we need to focus our attention on consolidating data split over multiple tables. SQL provides different methods for joining tables and views together, such as inner, outer, exception, cross and full join. A table or view even can be joined with itself or with the result of a different select statement. The result returned from multiple select statements can be merged, and even accumulated, in a single SQL statement.

10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.

What’s New in Db2 for i

Speaker: Scott Forstie, IBM

In the tradition of previous Technology Refreshes (TR), the database team is delivering enhancements on the same cadence. Attend this session to hear about the many enhancements to SQL on i, SQL Query Engine, IBM i Services and more. This session will cover the new and enhanced Db2 for i capabilities added to IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3 over the last Technology Refreshes.

IT Strategy and Roadmap Planning with an IBM Champion

Trevor Perry has years of experience in guiding and teaching customers in their IBM i application development and modernization efforts. In this session, you will learn how IT Strategy has been valuable to IBM i customers in moving forward in a fast-changing world. Real-life customer examples and roadmaps will be covered, outlining both positive and negative lessons learned.

Fresche is the leading provider of end-to-end IBM i application modernization and management solutions. Trevor brings his personal experience and perspective to Fresche, along with his career-long promotion of IBM i, application modernization, and innovative development.

Join Trevor, an IBM Champion, to learn how the right approach and strategy leads to IT success.

12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Profound.js: The Future of Open Source Development on IBM i

Businesses on IBM i have long been searching for the best way to bring their legacy applications into the modern age. Many businesses have taken on high-risk and high-cost system rewrites and migrations to try and update their antiquated systems. For many, these projects have been massive failures that cost millions of dollars and wasted years of development effort.

In this presentation, Alex will cover a completely new and unique way to modernize your legacy applications: Profound.js.

He will demonstrate how Profound.js:

Uses the power of Node.js in place of costly system re-writes and migrations

Supports an agile approach to legacy application modernization, not to mention IoT, Cloud and Watson APIs

Delivers truly modern applications in a fraction of the time re-writing can take

Leveraging RPG Skills for Web and Mobile Application Development

RPG developers have in-depth knowledge of the ERP and legacy applications, business logic and databases that run IT. Leveraging that unique knowledge to develop modern, browser based, mobile interfaces for those systems can save you time, cost and reduce risk. In this session, we’ll explore how your modernization strategy can leverage your existing ERP system and the valuable skills that your RPG developers can offer as well as look at different staffing models to help you get there.

We will walk through options on how to build your web development team and walk through case studies that utilize web services to deliver content to a browser based application hosted on the IBM i. The case studies include a PHP application, developed with Zend Framework 3 and Bootstrap that integrates with a legacy ERP on the IBM i using web services developed in RPG as well as others.

You’ll learn how ZF3, RPG, AngularJS and Bootstrap can be used to:

Separate the front-end coding from the back-end

Optimize the skills of IBM i and web developers

Leverage and extend the life of your ERP

Build applications for both desktop and mobile devices

Integrate with other systems

2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.

Continuous Integration (CI): Building a Strategy for IBM i Using Git, Jenkins and JIRA

How can traditional IBM i development languages, like RPG, CL, DDS or even COBOL, be integrated into the process used by other development teams using modern and/or open source tools like Jenkins, Git and JIRA? Learn how to bring these typically disparate teams into sync, using the same tools and delivering changes together.

We’ll take you through each phase of the DevOps cycle and see how to accomplish this integration, including what the challenges are for using open source tools across both IBM i and distributed systems. We’ll demonstrate how you can automate the most complex tasks like the dependency recompile (build) of specific IBM i technologies, such as ILE and Db2 SQL. Also, we’ll explore DIY techniques like Web services for accessing APIs to leverage existing tools and the resources you already have.

3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Free Form RPG: A Young Developer’s Experience in a Traditional IBM i Environment

Speaker: Kody Robinson, Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corporation

Free Form RPG was designed to promote RPG into a truly modern language, easy to read and maintain by both experienced programmers and new graduates. Now three years old, how successful has Free Form RPG been in practice? This session is presented by Kody Robinson, Developer on Business & Financial Systems at Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp. Kody is a recent college grad who did not learn RPG at school. His story relates his challenges on entering a traditional Fixed Format RPG III environment. We learn how converting into Free Format RPG helped Kody overcome complexity, using the conversion process as a learning tool, to become efficient in maintaining and modernizing the company’s core business applications on IBM i.

4:00 p.m. – 5:15 p.m.

Using Watson from RPG

Speaker: Scott Klement, Profound Logic

IBM has been making a splash with Watson and cognitive services. Did you know that you can use IBM Watson from your RPG applications? You can, if your IBM i can access the Internet. In this session, Scott explains how to integrate Watson’s capabilities into your RPG applications.